Dear Friends,

The Lion is loose! Mac OS X Lion is out and I disobeyed all of the IT department’s admonitions and immediately loaded up the latest and greatest operating system from Apple onto my MacBook Air. (Of course, a few days later my new MacBook Air came in, so I am in the middle of migration. More on that below.)

Hapy and I have a deal: I get the newest Apple notebooks and he gets the desktops. I have been scoring big time lately as the trend has been toward portable systems. I don’t have a lot to say about the new MacBook Air yet, but as I was working late into the night on the migration, I can say that I really appreciated the backlit keyboard.

I need to go on a Time Machine rant here. Apple’s Time Machine is reason enough to buy a Mac! My Time Machine back-ups are stored on a drive on my desk so that my MacBook Air is constantly backing up while I am working. Since I had a very current Time Machine back-up on my old computer, all I needed to do was connect it to my new MacBook Air and run Migration Assistant.

Another reason Time Machine is so great? I do not know the exact cause, but after I upgraded to Lion and Microsoft Office, my Address Book was totally empty. The normal tricks I use to find lost contacts were not working, so being the obsessive kind of guy that I am, I jumped in my car at about 9 PM and went back to the office. Since my back-ups are so up-to-date, after just a few minutes, I was well on my way to restoring my Address Book. Time Machine saves the day again! And it was intuitive, easy and flawless!

As I gain experience with Lion, I’ll be updating you in future issues of Kibbles & Bytes. I haven’t quite figured out the usefulness of the launch pad yet since my dock pretty much does what I need, but it is another tool.

We bid a fond farewell to Kibbles author Ben Bonnacio who is leaving Small Dog for a position closer to home, and say hello to Stephanie Reich, who will be stepping into his shoes in the Marketing Department as a new member of the Kibbles & Bytes team.